The present invention relates to an electronic blackboard which is designed so that desired storage data can be read from and written into a memory on the surface of a board. The present invention also pertains to an electronic blackboard system employing the above-described electronic blackboard.
As a result of the progress of office automation, various kinds of office automation equipment have been developed, and office work and business administration have been increasingly streamlined by making use of these office automation equipments. Among them are systems which are known as electronic meeting systems. One type of conventional electronic meeting system is arranged such that information which is written on a white board during a meeting is converted into an electric signal, or the content of a meeting is converted into a video signal, and these signals are transmitted through communication lines, thereby enabling meetings to proceed simultaneously at different places, or permitting the content of the meeting to be instantaneously transmitted to another place. In the conventional system that employs a white board, a coordinate detecting function is imparted to the white board, so that, when information concerning the content of a meeting is written on the white board with a specified writing implement, for example, a pen or the like, the written information is detected as coordinate data and converted into an electric signal.
To prepare a process control chart, it is general practice to make a schedule of work using a piece of paper having a standard size of Al (594.times.841 mm). However, since the number of activities which can be computed by a manual operation is about 500, if the number of activities exceeds it, a computer must be utilized. In such a case also, it is conventional practice to first prepare a draft using a sheet of paper of Al-size and then input data by means of an input sheet or an input screen.
Since in the electronic meeting system of the type described above the content or state of a meeting written on the white board is merely converted into an electric signal, each piece of information which needs to be transmitted must be input onto the white board on each occasion. To move or copy the information written on the white board to another position thereon to correct or alter the written information, it is necessary to erase unnecessary items and insert new items to the information a plurality of times. Even a predetermined item must be written every time it needs to be input.
Accordingly, in either case where the content of a meeting is input and processed as data by the use of a white board or a process control chart is prepared using a white board, all the necessary information must be written on the white board, and the necessity of inputting (e.g., writing) the required information leads to a lowering in the working or meeting efficiency.
The conventional electronic blackboard also suffers from the disadvantage that it merely reads characters or line drawings drawn on a blackboard as information in the form of images and is incapable of directly processing numerals written thereon as being data for a computer.
It is generally a important matter of control to process daily reports at a construction site or the like, and various kinds of system have been developed to facilitate such administrative processing and save the labor consumed therein. However, conventional computerized daily report processing has the problem that, since daily reports are handled as input data, a troublesome manual operation is needed to input data using a keyboard and a great deal of time and labor are needed to present (manually) and collect daily reports. If the data processing system is not abundant in equipment, the input time may overlap that for another system, for example, the cost control. Since the operator must refer to a code table or the like when inputting data, a great deal of time and labor is needed to input data. In addition, in many cases, descriptions of the contents of daily reports for subcontractors are unclear and lack unity, so that it is impossible to grasp the daily records of work at once and it takes time and labor to prepare a monthly collective chart.